Crisis Averted

Let this be a lesson to everyone who uses more than one device. Last week my iPad suffered an unfortunate meeting with a glass of juice and has been a little out of sorts ever since – completely unusable, actually (Lesson within the lesson – don’t leave glasses of juice around your iPad when you have a two-year-old). I realized today that all my research bookmarks for my book were on the iPad, and not only was it not working, it had also been reset and wiped clean of all its apps and data at the Apple store when I took it in to see if it could be saved. Dozens of links to much-needed information gone, I thought, and I’d neglected to check the box to keep bookmarks synced in iTunes when I’d backed it up beforehand. Honestly, the thought that I should back them up too had never occurred to me.

Thankfully, after an hour of frantic forum and help topic reading, as well as many curse words both typed and uttered aloud, I recovered all the bookmarks directly from the iPad and now have them safely synced in Firefox.

Giant sigh of relief.

The lesson: it’s not enough to back up the document you write in. Save EVERYTHING you need to do your work, and save yourself some heartache.

The iPad itself is still a write-off, unfortunately, since the touchscreen is all buggy (possessed?) :( but right now I’m valuing the data I managed to save more than the actual device. A small silver lining?